Match Making Data

When we talk about the benefits of open data, people describe how opening up information can help the public become “armchair auditors” as well as enable developers to use the data to build new applications. But what about people who work for those public services, could they benefit too?

Creating relationships between types of data

To help us make sense of this, we looked at the previous posts and saw that the relationships between different types of data that create new meaning. Above is an example of a visualisation which does just that mapping the sift of the Irish population to Dublin over the years (click on the image to activate). So we’ve started to put together a table below showing how the smart use of open data can help people working in public service and civil society organisations.

Visualization	Approach*	Potential beneficiaries*
Relationship between…	Different types of statistics around a particular variable (such as a place, service or customer)	Service managers/Members
	People or business units connected between each other, so you can evaluate how well they’re delivering together towards objectives	Programme and partnership coordinators, business planning leads/Portfolio leads
	Different words through pattern matching or tag clouds	Policy and research officers
Different dimensions of…	Analysis (such as techniques or resources)	Business analysts
	Numeric values through circles to compare different aspects of variables	Data analysts
	The distribution of resources within a project or department	Resource managers
	Change over different options over the same variable, such as time	Service managers
	Hierarchical structures where specific issues have been divided into categories (i.e. spending on services divided into different teams)	Organisational and workforce development officers
	More traditional graphing, such as line graphs and pie charts	Service managers
Translation of unstructured information to structured knowledge to…	Turn information into structured “issue trees”	Consultation and press officers
	Graph the importance of specific words over others in documents	Policy and research officers

The roles mentioned are indicative, as I’m sure those roles may have different names where you work.

The examples used aren’t all from the UK, let alone from public services, they are simply the best we’ve found. We really like Bristol’s approach to managing it’s data for research. If you’ve found other really good examples, please add them in the comment box below.

What other types of visualisation have you seen or even created to show the relationships between different types of data?